Fantastic Negrito refuses to let Grammy win distract him

Fantastic Negrito is staying focused, not letting the post-Grammy noise become a distraction. (Lyle Owerko)

You’d think that any artist who wins a Grammy award — as Fantastic Negrito did for best contemporary blues album for his 2016 release, “The Last Days of Oakland” – would be thrilled. But Negrito, born Xavier Dphrepaulezz in 1968, saw it as a distraction.

“What did winning a Grammy do for me?” says the singer, who plays Sunday at the Chicago Blues Fest. “It made me want to get rid of my Grammy, pack it away and never see it again. It made me not want to speak to anyone who wanted to speak about my Grammy.”

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But rather than cut our interview short, the garrulous Dphrepaulezz is more than happy to elaborate. “Dwelling on awards like that is such a dangerous road,” he says. “I want to be an artist, not be in the business of making hit records. Once I figured that out, everything became clear.”

He had crashed on that road before. As a kid, Dphrepaulezz grew up amid hustlers, pimps and drug dealers in Oakland, but pulled himself out by teaching himself how to play multiple instruments. He was signed to a record deal by Jimmy Iovine of Interscope Records, and put out his debut album, a pop-leaning affair called “The X Factor,” in 1996, under the name Xavier. The record tanked, and Dphrepaulezz took it hard.

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“I was in my 20s and I was a genius, I knew everything,” he says with a laugh. “I realize now that was supposed to happen. It taught me that I don’t want to measure success by that, because it can be an end of freedom and expression.”

But before that slow-emerging revelation, there was more hardship. A near-fatal car accident left him in a coma for three weeks, and damaged his hand so badly he feared he would never play guitar again. When he recovered, he played in a variety of bands, licensed some of his music for use in TV and movies, and then dropped out altogether in 2007.

“Mainly I wanted to be a farmer and grow some weed and vegetables -- and live,” he says. “I wanted to do life, do something interesting. I ran out of things I wanted to say in my music, so I just put it down, sold all my gear, and put on some overalls and reconnected with the soil.”

He kept one beat-up guitar, and finally pulled it out one day when his young son began crying uncontrollably. The child was fascinated by what he heard.

“I played something off the top of my head in G major, and my son’s reaction changed everything, changed the course of my life,” he says. “It was like I was the student and my baby was the teacher. It started the slow walk to doing this.”

Dphrepaulezz found himself drifting back to the black roots music he had first heard as a child at home, but had initially dismissed as foreign, unconnected to his life. “I discovered the blues again thinking about my grandmother and her brother, who would tell me incredible stories about this music,” he says. “I would record grandma talking about the old South, and it made me want to hear music from that period. I had to taste failure, bleakness, almost lose my hand, to appreciate it. I heard Skip James and it pierced me. It felt like punk rock to me, real and raw. It was just one guitar, so simple yet so much expression. I wanted to feel and express like that, to take the shortest path to get to an emotion.”

He dubbed himself “Fantastic Negrito” as a way of appropriating a word he heard a lot while living in close proximity to Mexican-American families in his childhood neighborhood. “I thought it was beautiful the way they would sing, ‘Oh, negrito,’ ‘oh, negrita,’” he says. “It’s a word that has been viewed as derogatory, a negative term, and we are always fed that. That’s why I put ‘fantastic’ in front of it, because we’ve contributed so much to the world, including the blues.”

The next Fantastic Negrito album, “Please Don’t Be Dead” (Cooking Vinyl), which is out June 15, is even more raw and intensely political than its predecessor, a cauldron of punk-blues flavored with soul, funk and gospel. It confronts a litany of social afflictions – opioid addiction, homelessness, despair, suicide – and tries to point a way out. “Knock me down two or three times, I get back up and keep on fighting,” Dphrepaulezz sings as the album winds down.

“I have (three) little children and I want to make music in which they can find some truth and wisdom when I’m gone,” he says. “I wanted to make the most relevant music I could for this time. I only recorded something if I fell in love with it, and I fell in love with these riffs and chants and put them on steroids. The idea was, let’s sing loud with the blues in E, because we have to compete with all the noise out there, a tribe of evil trying to destroy us. I’ve got a podium, a platform, and I wanted to fight back. We can do it better than the hatemongers with art, music, film writing, literature, and help the world go on a better wavelength.”